• MALSORI
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• no.35_36
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• pp.25-36
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• 1998

The prosodic properties of Korean and English stress were examined with focus on syllable duration and pitch by loan words. 14 loan words were selected by the criteria of the numbers of syllables and stress positions. 3 Korean males using Seoul dialect and 3 American males using general American English served as subjects. Each tokens were uttered 3 times and second one was chosen to be analysed by CSL. We measured the duration and F0 of each syllable. In English, duration is the most salient acoustic correlates of stress, and pitch is the second. In Korean, by contrast, it seems that neither duration nor pitch is the acoustic features of stress, from our data

• Speech Sciences
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.21-30
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• 2008

The current study investigated distributional properties of the Korean Accentual Phrase and their implication to word segmentation. The properties examined were the frequency of various AP tonal patterns, the types of tonal patterns that are imposed upon content words, and the average number and temporal location of content words within the AP. A total of 414 sentences from the Read speech corpus and the Radio corpus were used for the data analysis. The results showed that the 84% of the APs contained one content word, and that almost 90% of the content words are located in AP-initial position. When the AP-initial onset was not an aspirated or tense consonant, the most common AP patterns were LH, LHH, and LHLH (78%), and 88% of the multisyllabic content words start with a rising tone in AP-initial position. When the AP-initial onset was an aspirated or tense consonant, the most common AP patterns were HH, HHLH, and HHL (72%), and 74% of the multisyllabic content words start with a level H tone in AP-initial position. The data further showed that 84.1% of APs end with the final H tone. The findings provide valuable information about the prosodic pattern and structure of Korean APs, and account for the results of a previous study which showed that Korean listeners are sensitive to AP-initial rising and AP-final high tones (Kim, 2007). This is in line with other cross-linguistic research which has revealed the correlation between prosodic probability and speech processing strategy.

• MALSORI
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• no.52
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• pp.1-14
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• 2004

In this study, we investigated acoustic characteristics of imitated utterances by a professional voice imitator, focusing on prosodic properties such as vowel formants and f0 distribution. To see the patterns of a voice imitation by a professional voice imitator, we compared the imitator's voice data with target speakers' voice data. The professional imitator, Mr. Bae produced utterances imitating the former President Kim's, the comedian Choi's, and the singer Bae's voices. Auditorily, the imitator was judged to imitate all the target speakers' voices successfully. However, acoustic examination showed that the imitator was better at imitating the singer Bae's voice in that the imitator's and the singer Bae's voices are more alike with respect to vowel formants and f0 distribution. We infer this is because the imitator's normal voice is very similar to the singer Bae's voice. On the other hand, the imitator's voice data showed that the patterns of vowel formants and f0 distribution found in the imitator's imitation voices of the other two target speakers were different from those of target speakers' voices.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.3 no.1
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• pp.3-14
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• 2011

It has been posited that in English, native listeners use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy (MSS) for the segmentation of continuous speech. Strong syllables tend to be perceived as potential word onsets for English native speakers, which is due to the high proportion of strong syllables word-initially in the English vocabulary. This study investigates whether Koreans employ the same strategy when segmenting speech input in English. Word-spotting experiments were conducted using vowel-initial and consonant-initial bisyllabic targets embedded in nonsense trisyllables in Experiment 1 and 2, respectively. The effect of strong syllable was significant in the RT (reaction times) analysis but not in the error analysis. In both experiments, Korean listeners detected words more slowly when the word-initial syllable is strong (stressed) than when it is weak (unstressed). However, the error analysis showed that there was no effect of initial stress in Experiment 1 and in the item (F2) analysis in Experiment 2. Only the subject (F1) analysis in Experiment 2 showed that the participants made more errors when the word starts with a strong syllable. These findings suggest that Koran listeners do not use the Metrical Segmentation Strategy for segmenting English speech. They do not treat strong syllables as word beginnings, but rather have difficulties recognizing words when the word starts with a strong syllable. These results are discussed in terms of intonational properties of Korean prosodic phrases which are found to serve as lexical segmentation cues in the Korean language.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.15-21
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• 2019

Korean and English are both known to show on-focus pitch range expansion and post-focus pitch range compression (PFC). But it is not clear if this prosodic similarity would make it easy for Korean speakers to learn English focus prosody. In the present study, we conducted a production experiment using phone number strings to examine whether Korean learners of English produce a native-like focus prosody. Korean learners of English were classified into three groups (advanced, intermediate and low) according to their English proficiency and were compared to native speakers. Results show that intermediate and low groups of speakers did not increase duration, intensity, and pitch in the focus positions, nor did they compress those cues in the post-focus positions. Advanced speakers noticeably increased the acoustic cues in the focus positions to a similar extent as native speakers. However, their performance in post-focus positions was quite far from that of native speakers in terms of pitch and excursion size. These results thus demonstrate a lack of positive transfer of focus prosody from Korean to English in L2 learning, and learners may have to relearn it from scratch, which is consistent with a previous finding. More importantly, the results provide further support for the view proposed in other works that acoustic properties of PFC were not easily transferred from one language to another.

• Proceedings of the KSPS conference
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• 1996.10a
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• pp.246-246
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• 1996

Purpose: Some of the properties of the prosodic phrasing and some acoustic and phonological effects of contrastive focus on the tonal pattern of Seoul Korean is explored based on a brief experiment of analyzing the fundamental frequency(=FO) contour of the speech of the author. Data Base and Analysis Procedures: The examples were chosen to contain mostly nasal and liquid consonants, since it is difficult to track down the formants in stops and fricatives during their corresponding consonantal intervals and stops may yield an effect of unwanted increase in the FO value due to their burst into the following vowel. All examples were recorded three times and the spectrum of the most stable repetition was generated, from which the FO contour of each sentence was obtained, the peaks with a value higher than 250Hz being interpreted as a high tone (=H). The result is then discussed within the prosodic hierarchy framework of Selkirk (1986) and compared with the tonal pattern of the Northern Kyungsang dialect of Korean reported in Kenstowicz & Sohn (1996). Prosodic Phrasing: In N.K. Korean, H never appears both on the object and on the verb in a neutral sentence, which indicates the object and the verb form a single Phonological Phrase ($={\phi}$), given that there is only one pitch peak for each $={\phi}$. However, Seoul Korean shows that both the object and the verb have H of their own, indicating that they are not contained in one $={\phi}$. This violates the Optimality constraint of Wrap-XP (=Enclose a lexical head and its arguments in one $={\phi}$), while N.K. Korean obeys the constraint by grouping a VP in a single $={\phi}$. This asymmetry can be resolved through a constraint that favors the separate grouping of each lexical category and is ranked higher than Wrap-XP in Seoul Korean but vice versa in N.K. Korean; $Align-x^{lex}$ (=Align the left edge of a lexical category with that of a $={\phi}$). (1) nuna-ka manll-ll mEk-nIn-ta ('sister-NOM garlic-ACC eat-PRES-DECL') a. (LLH) (LLH) (HLL) ----Seoul Korean b. (LLH) (LLL LHL) ----N.K. Korean Focus and Phrasing: Two major effects of contrastive focus on phonological phrasing are found in Seoul Korean: (a) the peak of an Intonatioanl Phrase (=IP) falls on the focused element; and (b) focus has the effect of deleting all the following prosodic structures. A focused element always attracts the peak of IP, showing an increase of approximately 30Hz compared with the peak of a non-focused IP. When a subject is focused, no H appears either on the object or on the verb and a focused object is never followed by a verb with H. The post-focus deletion of prosodic boundaries is forced through the interaction of StressFocus (=If F is a focus and DF is its semantic domain, the highest prominence in DF will be within F) and Rightmost-IP (=The peak of an IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$). First Stress-F requires the peak of IP to fall on the focused element. Then to avoid violating Rightmost-IP, all the boundaries after the focused element should delete, minimizing the number of $={\phi}$'s intervening from the right edge of IP. (2) (omitted) Conclusion: In general, there seems to be no direct alignment constraints between the syntactically focused element and the edge of $={\phi}$ determined in phonology; all the alignment effects come from a single requirement that the peak of IP projects from the rightmost $={\phi}$ as proposed in Truckenbrodt (1995).

• Journal of Music and Human Behavior
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.49-68
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• 2024

This study aims to acoustically analyze Korean language characteristics and convert these findings into musical elements, providing foundational data for evidence-based music-language rehabilitation. We collected voice data from thirty men and thirty women aged 19-25, each providing six-syllable prosodic units composed of two accentual phrases, including both declarative and interrogative sentences. Analyzing this data with Praat, we extracted syllabic acoustic properties and conducted statistical analyses based on acoustic properties, sentence type, gender, and particle presence. Significant differences were found in syllable frequency and duration based on accentual phrases and prosodic units (p < .001), with interrogative showing higher frequencies and declaratives longer durations (p < .001). Female frequencies were significantly higher than males' (p < .001), with longer durations observed (p < .001). Particle syllables also showed significantly stronger intensities (p < .001). Finally, we presented melodies converted from these acoustic properties into musical scores based on pitch, duration, and accent. The insights from this analysis of six-syllable Korean sentences will guide further research on developing a system for melodizing large-scale Korean speech data, expected to be crucial in music-based language rehabilitation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.12-21
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• 1998

이 연구는 몇 가지 음성적 특징들이 한국어 연속 음성에서의 운율단위의 운율 단서 로 사용되어질 수 있음을 보여 준다. 구 단위의 운율 이론 체계에서 한국어의 운율단위를 악센트구와 억양구로 정의한 전선아(1993)의 연구 결과를 연속음성 자료에 도입하면서 운율 경계에서의 음성적 특징들을 살펴보았다. 연구 결과 악센트구와 억양구말에서는 피치 패턴 과 경계성조의 변화 뿐 아니라 단위말 음절의 길이 증가 현상이 두드러짐을 알 수 있었다. 또 악센트구와 억양구초에서는 모음으로 시작하는 음절의 경우, 모음 시작부에서의 성문음 화가 특징으로 나타난다. 운율 경계에서의 이런 음성적 특징들은 운율단위를 구분짓는 단서 로 이용될 수 있으며 또한 한국어 연속음성의 운율적 패턴을 이해할 수 있게 한다.

• Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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• v.4 no.2
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• pp.51-59
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• 2012

The purpose of this study is to examine the pitch pattern of Korean accentual phrases produced by Chinese Korean-learners in the reading of a Korean text. Korean accentual phrase is determined by a specific F0 contour. And the pitch contour of APs differ depending on their length and the nature of initial segment. In order to examine if Chinese speakers are also aware such a phonetic properties, we have examined the AP pitch contours produced by 15 Chinese speakers differing in proficiency, and compared them to pitch contours produced by six Korean native speakers. The results show that Chinese speakers' pitch errors were observed in initial segment-tone interaction and in type of pitch patterns. However, even though Chines speakers produced the same type of pitch patterns, internal tonal modulation differs from native speakers. Finally, on the basis of theses results, we proposed a teaching method that visualizes the F0 contour.

• Speech Sciences
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.7-21
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• 2003

Sums-of-Products models were built for segment duration prediction of spoken Korean. An experiment for the modelling was carried out to apply the results to Korean text-to-speech synthesis systems. 670 read sentences were analyzed. trained and tested for the construction of the duration models. Traditional sequential rule systems were extended to simple additive, multiplicative and additive-multiplicative models based on Sums-of-Products modelling. The parameters used in the modelling include the properties of the target segment and its neighbors and the target segment's position in the prosodic structure. Two optimisation strategies were used: the downhill simplex method and the simulated annealing method. The performance of the models was measured by the correlation coefficient and the root mean squared prediction error (RMSE) between actual and predicted duration in the test data. The best performance was obtained when the data was trained and tested by ' additive-multiplicative models. ' The correlation for the vowel duration prediction was 0.69 and the RMSE. 31.80 ms. while the correlation for the consonant duration prediction was 0.54 and the RMSE. 29.02 ms. The results were not good enough to be applied to the real-time text-to-speech systems. Further investigation of feature interactions is required for the better performance of the Sums-of-Products models.